Frankenstein: A Feminist Critique of Science
(1987)

Anne K. Mellor

In One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature,
ed. George Levine and Alan Rauch (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin
Press, 1987), pp. 287-312

[This essay was subsequently reprinted as Chap. 5 of Mary
Shelley: Her Life, Her Fictions, Her Monsters (1988): up to
subsection II in this version, with one exception linked as an
addendum, differences between the texts are essentially
stylistic. Where the texts eventually diverge at subsection II,
then, the simplest solution has seemed to be that of
representing the 1988 text as a separate, linked entity. Up to
that point, for convenient reference to this second version, its
page demarcations are given in double curled brackets
{{--}}.]

{287} {{89}} From a feminist perspective, the most significant
dimension of the relationship between literature and science is
the degree to which both enterprises are grounded on the use of
metaphor and image. The explanatory models of science, like the
plots of literary works, depend on linguistic structures which
are shaped by metaphor and metonymy. The feminist reader is
perhaps most sensitized to those symbolic structures which
employ gender as a major variable or value. When Francis Bacon announced, "I am
come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children
to bind her to your service and make her your slave,"1 he identified
the pursuit of modern science with a form of sexual politics:
the aggressive, virile male scientist legitimately captures and
enslaves a passive, fertile female nature. Mary Shelley was one
of the first to comprehend and illustrate the dangers inherent
in the use of sexist metaphors in the seventeenth-century
scientific revolution.

Mary Shelley grounded her fiction of the scientist who creates a
monster he can't control upon an extensive understanding of the
most recent scientific developments of her day. More important,
she used this knowledge both to analyze and to criticize the
more dangerous implications of both the scientific method and
its practical results. Implicitly, she contrasted what she
considered "good" science -- the detailed and reverent
description of the workings of nature -- to "bad" science, the
hubristic manipulation of the forces of nature to serve man's
private ends. In Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus,
she illustrated the potential evils of scientific hubris and at
the same time challenged any conception of science and the
scientific method that rested on a gendered definition of nature
as female. Fully to appreciate the {{90}} significance of Mary
Shelley's feminist critique of modern science, {288} we must
look first at the particular scientific research upon which her
novel is based.

I

The works of three of the most famous scientists of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century -- Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin, and Luigi Galvani -- together with
the teachings of two of their ardent disciples, Adam Walker and
Percy Shelley, were crucial to Mary Shelley's understanding of
science and the scientific enterprise. While no scientist
herself (her description of Victor Frankenstein's laboratory is
both vague and naive; apparently Victor does all his experiments
in a small attic room by the light of a single candle), Mary
Shelley nonetheless had a sound grasp of the concepts and
implications of some of the most important scientific work of
her day. In her novel, she distinguishes between those
scientific researches which attempt to describe accurately the
functionings of the physical universe and those which attempt to
control or change that universe through human
intervention. Implicitly, she celebrates the former, which she
associates most closely with the work of Erasmus Darwin, while
she calls attention to the dangers inherent in the latter, found
in the work of Davy, Galvani, and Walker.

Victor Frankenstein chooses to work within the newly established
field of chemical physiology; thus, he must be familiar with
recent experiments in the disparate fields of biology, chemistry, mechanics, physics, and medicine. M. Waldman,
Victor's chemistry professor at the University of Ingolstadt, observes that "a
man would make but a very sorry chemist, if he attended to that
department of human knowledge alone," and therefore advises
Victor "to apply to every branch of natural philosophy,
including mathematics."2

{{91}} Victor and Professor Waldman's concept of the nature and
utility of chemistry is based upon Humphry Davy's famous
introductory lecture to a course in chemistry given at the newly
founded Royal Institution
on 21 January 1802.3 Immediately published as A Discourse, Introductory to a
Course of Lectures on Chemistry, this pamphlet is
probably the work that Mary Shelley read on Monday, 28 October
1816, just before working on her story of Frankenstein.4 Waldman's
enthusiasm for and description {289} of the benefits to be
derived from the study of chemistry seem to be derived from
Davy's remarks, as does Victor Frankenstein's belief that
chemistry might discover the secret of life itself.

Davy probably also supplied Mary Shelley's description of the
first parts of Professor Waldman's introductory lecture on
chemistry -- the opening "recapitulation of the history of
chemistry and the various improvements made by different men of
learning," followed by "a cursory view of the present state of
the sciences," an explanation of several key terms and a few
preparatory experiments (F, p. 42) -- which come not so much
from Davy's Discourse as from his later textbook, Elements of Chemical
Philosophy (London, 1812), which Percy Shelley ordered
from Thomas Hookham on 29 July 1812.5 This may be the book listed in
Mary's Journal on 29, 30 October, 2 and 4 November 18l6,
where Mary notes that she "read Davy's 'Chemistry' with {{92}}
Shelley" and then alone. A glance at the table of contents of
this book would have given Mary Shelley the outline she
attributes to Waldman: a brief history, followed by a discussion
of several specific elements and compounds, with descriptions of
experiments performed. The contents probably also provided her
with the description of the lectures on natural philosophy that
Victor Frankenstein attended in Geneva:

Some accident prevented my attending these lectures until the
course was nearly finished. The lecture being therefore one of
the last was entirely incomprehensible to me. The professor
discoursed with the greatest fluency of potassium and boron, of
sulphates and oxyds, terms to which I could affix no idea.
(F, p. 36)

Davy's Discourse, written to attract and keep a large
audience, provided Mary Shelley with both the content and the
rhetoric of Waldman's final panegyric on modern chemistry, which
directly inspired Victor Frankenstein's subsequent research.
Waldman concludes,

The ancient teachers of this science . . . promised
impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters
promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted,
and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these
philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and
their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed
performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature,
and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into
the heavens; {290} they have discovered how the blood
circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have
acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the
thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the
invisible world with its own shadows. (F, p. 42)

Davy, in his celebration of the powers of chemistry, asserted
that "the phenomena of combustion, of the solution of different
substances in water, of the agencies of fire, the production of
rain, hail, and snow, and the conversion of dead matter into
living matter by vegetable organs, all belong to chemistry."6 Arguing that
chemistry is the basis of many other sciences, including
mechanics, natural history, mineralogy, astronomy, medicine,
physiology, pharmacy, botany, and zoology, Davy insists,

How dependent, in fact, upon chemical processes are the
nourishment and growth of organized beings; their various
alterations of form, their constant production of new
substances; and, finally, their death and decomposition, in
which nature seems to take unto herself those {{93}} elements
and constituent principles which, for a while, she had lent to a
superior agent as the organs and instruments of the spirit of
life! (Discourse, no. 8)

After detailing the necessity of chemical knowledge to all the
operations of common life, including agriculture, metalworking,
bleaching, dyeing, leather tanning, and glass and porcelain
making, Davy paints an idealistic portrait of the contemporary
chemist, who is informed by a science that

has given to him an acquaintance with the different relations of
the parts of the external world; and more than that, it has
bestowed upon him powers which may be almost called creative;
which have enabled him to modify and change the beings
surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature
with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to
understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with
his own instruments. (Discourseno. 16)

Davy then sketches an even more visionary picture of the
scientist of the future, who will discover the still unknown
general laws of chemistry,

for who would not be ambitious of becoming acquainted with the
most profound secrets of nature; of ascertaining her hidden
operations; and of exhibiting to men that system of knowledge
which relates so intimately to their own physical and moral
constitution? (Discourse, no. 17)

{291} These are Waldman's chemists, who "penetrate into the
recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding
places."

The result of such activity, Davy confidently predicts, will be
a more harmonious, cooperative and healthy society. True, he
cautions, "We do not look to distant ages, or amuse ourselves
with brilliant, though delusive dreams, concerning the infinite
improveability of man, the annihilation of labour, disease, and
even death" (Discourse, no. 22). But even as Davy
apparently disavows the very dream that would inspire Victor
Frankenstein, he claims for his own project something very
similar: "we reason by analogy from simple facts. We consider
only a state of human progression arising out of its present
condition. We look for a time that we may reasonably expect,
for a bright day of which we already behold the dawn"
(Discourse, no.
22). Having boldly stated the social benefits to be {{94}}
derived from the pursuit of chemistry, Davy concludes by
insisting on the personal gratifications to be gained: "it may
destroy diseases of the imagination, owing to too deep a
sensibility; and it may attach the affections to objects,
permanent, important, and intimately related to the interests of
the human species," even as it militates against the "influence
of terms connected only with feeling" and encourages instead a
rational contemplation of the universal order of things
(Discourse, no.
26).

In fairness to Davy, he was very skeptical about Victor
Frankenstein's chosen field, the new field of chemical
physiology. Commenting on just the kind of enterprise
Frankenstein pursues, the search for the principle of life
itself, Davy warns:

if the connexion of chemistry with physiology has given rise to
some visionary and seductive theories; yet even this
circumstance has been useful to the public mind in exciting it
by doubt, and in leading it to new investigations. A reproach,
to a certain degree just, has been thrown upon those doctrines
known by the name of the chemical physiology; for in the
applications of them speculative philosophers have been guided
rather by the analogies of words than of facts. Instead of
slowly endeavouring to lift up the veil concealing the wonderful
phenomena of living nature; full of ardent imaginations, they
have vainly and presumptuously attempted to tear it asunder.
(Discourse, no.
9)

Mary Shelley clearly heeded Davy's words, for she presents
Victor Frankenstein as the embodiment of hubris, of that Satanic or Faustian {292} presumption
which blasphemously attempts to penetrate the sacred mysteries
of the universe.

But in contrast to Davy, Mary Shelley doubted whether chemistry
itself -- insofar as it involved a "mastery" of nature --
produced only good. She substituted for Davy's complacent image
of the happy scientist living in harmony with both his community
and himself the frightening image of the alienated scientist
working in feverish isolation, cut off both physically and
emotionally from his family, friends, and society. Victor
Frankenstein's scientific researches not only bring him no
satisfaction; they also leave him, as Laura Crouch has observed,
disgusted with the entire scientific enterprise.7 Detached from
a respect for nature and from a strong sense of personal
responsibility for the products of one's research, scientific
experimentation and purely objective thought can and do produce
monsters. Mary Shelley might have found trenchant support for
her view in Humphrey Davy's praise for one of chemistry's most
notable {{95}} achievements: "in leading to the discovery of
gunpowder, [chemistry] has changed the institutions of society,
and rendered war more independent of brutal strength, less
personal, and less barbarous."8

In contrast to Davy, Erasmus
Darwin provided Mary Shelley with a powerful image of what
she considered "good" science, a careful observation and
celebration of the operations of nature with no attempt
radically to alter either the way nature works or the
institutions of society. Percy Shelley acknowledged the impact
of Erasmus Darwin's work on his wife's novel when he began the
Preface to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein with the assertion
that "the event on which this fiction is founded has been
supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers
of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence" (F, p. 1). To what specific
suppositions, theories, and experiments, by Erasmus Darwin and
others, did Percy Shelley allude? Mary Shelley, in her Preface
to the 1831 edition, referred to an admittedly apocryphal
account of one of Dr. Darwin's experiments. During one of Byron
and Shelley's many long conversations to which she was "a devout
but nearly silent listener," Mary Shelley recalled,

various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others
the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any
probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They
talked of the experi- {293} ments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of
what the doctor really did or said that he did, but, as more to
my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by
him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till
by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary
motion. (F, p. 227)

Even though Mary Shelley acknowledges that the animated piece of
vermicelli is probably a fiction, Erasmus Darwin's theories have
significant bearing on her purposes in Frankenstein.

Erasmus Darwin was most famous for his work on evolution and the
growth of plants, and it is this work that Mary Shelley
affirmed. Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as a direct opponent
of Darwin's teachings, as an anti-evolutionist and a parodic
perpetrator of an erroneous "Creation Theory." To perceive this
dimension of Victor Frankenstein's project, we must first review
the basic tenets of Erasmus Darwin's theories as they appear in
his major works, The Botanic Garden (1789, 1791), Zoonomia; or,
The Laws of Organic Life (1794),
Phytologia (1800), and The Temple of Nature
(1803).

Eighteenth-century scientists generally conceived of the
universe as a perfect, static world created by divine fiat at a
single moment in time. This universe, metaphorically
represented as a "great chain of being," manifested myriad and
minute gradations between the species, but these relationships
were regarded as fixed and permanent. {{96}} As Linnaeus, the great
eighteenth-century classifier of all known plant life, insisted
in his Systema Naturae (1735), "Nullae species novae" --
no new species can come into existence in a divinely ordered,
perfect world. But by the end of the eighteenth century, under
pressure from Herschel's
new discoveries in astronomy, Cuvier's paleontological
researches, William Smith's studies of fossil stratification,
Sprengel's work on botanical crossbreeding and fertilization,
and observations made with an increasingly powerful microscope,
together with a more diffuse Leibnizian "natural theology"
that emphasized the study of nature and her interactions with
human populations, the orthodox Linnaean concept of an immutable
physical universe had begun to weaken.9

Erasmus Darwin was inspired by the researches of the Comte du Buffon, the "father of
evolution," who in his huge Histoire Naturelle (44
volumes, 1749-1804) had described myriads of flora and fauna and
interspersed comments on the progressive "degeneration" of life
forms {294} from earlier and more uniform species, often caused
by environmental or climatic changes. Although he adhered to the
concept of the scala naturae and the immutability of
species, Buffon was the first to discuss seriously such central
evolutionary problems as the origin of the earth, the extinction
of species, the theory of "common descent," and in particular
the reproductive isolation between two incipient species.10
Significantly, it was to Buffon that Victor Frankenstein also
turned after his early disillusionment with the alchemists, and
Buffon whom he "still read . . . with delight"
(F, p. 36).11 But it was
Erasmus Darwin who for English readers first synthesized and
popularized the concept of the evolution of species through
natural selection over millions of years.

By 1803, Erasmus Darwin had accepted, on the basis of shell and
fossil remains in the highest geological strata, that the earth
must once have been covered by water and hence that all life
began in the sea. As Darwin concisely summed up this theory of
evolution in his notes to The Temple of Nature,

After islands or continents were raised above the primeval
ocean, great numbers of the most simple animals would attempt to
seek food at the edges or shores of the new land, and might
thence gradually become amphibious; as is now seen in the frog,
who changes from an aquatic animal to an amphibious one, and in
the gnat, which changes from a natant to a volant one.

At the same time new microscopic animalcules would immediately
commence wherever there was warmth and moisture, and some
organic matter, that might induce putridity. Those situated on
dry land, and immersed in dry air, may gradually acquire new
powers to preserve their existence; and by innumerable
successive reproductions for some thousands, or perhaps millions
of ages, may at length have produced many of the vegetable and
animal inhabitants which now people the earth.

As innumerable shell-fish must have existed a long time beneath
the ocean, before the calcareous mountains were produced and
elevated; it is also probable, that many of the insect tribes,
or less complicate animals, existed long before the quadrupeds
or more complicate ones.12

Meditating on the suggestion that mankind descended from "one
family of monkeys on the banks of the Mediterranean" that
learned to use and strengthen the thumb muscle and "by this
improved use of the sense of touch . . . acquired
clear ideas, and gradually became men," Darwin speculated,

{295} {{97}} Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their
progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern
discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation
of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe, and consonant to
the dignity of the Creator of all things. (Temple of
Nature, p. 54)

Darwin further suggested that such evolutionary improvement is
the direct result of sexual selection:

A great want of one part of the animal world has consisted in
the desire of the exclusive possession of the females; and these
have acquired weapons to bombard each other for this purpose, as
the very thick, shield-like, horny skin on the shoulder of the
boar is a defense only against animals of his own species, who
strike obliquely upwards, nor are his tusk for other purposes,
except to defend himself, as he is not naturally a carnivorous
animal. So the horns of the stag are not sharp to offend his
adversary, but are branched for the purpose of parrying or
receiving the thrusts of horns similar to his own, and have
therefore been formed for the purpose of combating other stags
for the exclusive possession of the females; who are observed,
like the ladies in the times of chivalry, to attend the car of
the victor.13

Erasmus Darwin anticipated the modern discovery of mutations,
noting in his discussion of monstrous births that monstrosities,
or mutations, may be inherited: "Many of these enormities of
shape are propagated, and continued as a variety at least, if
not as a new species of animal. I have seen a breed of cats
with an additional claw on every foot" (Zoonomia, 1794,
1: 501).

In relation to Frankenstein, Erasmus Darwin's most
significant evolutionary concept was that of the hierarchy of
reproduction. Again and again, in Zoonomia, in The
Botanic Garden, in Phytologia, and in The Temple
of Nature, Darwin insisted that sexual reproduction is at a
higher evolutionary level than hermaphroditic or solitary
paternal propagation. As Darwin commented in his note
"Reproduction" in The Temple of Nature,

The microscopic productions of spontaneous vitality, and the
next most inferior kinds of vegetables and animals, propagate by
solitary generation only; as the buds and bulbs raised
immediately from seeds, the lycoperdon tuber, with probably many
other fungi, and the polypus, volvox, and taenia. Those of the
next order propagate both by solitary and sexual reproduction,
as those buds and bulbs which produce flowers as well as other
buds or bulbs; and the aphis and probably many other {296}
insects. Whence it appears, that many of those vegetables and
animals, which are produced by solitary generation, {{98}}
gradually become more perfect, and at length produce a sexual
progeny.

A third order of organic nature consists of hermaphrodite
vegetables and animals, as in those flowers which have anthers
and stigmas in the same corol; and in many insects, as leeches,
snails, and worms; and perhaps all those reptiles which have no
bones. . .

This concept of the superiority of sexual reproduction over
paternal propagation was so important to Erasmus Darwin that it
forced him radically to revise his concept of reproduction in
his third, "corrected" edition of Zoonomia. In 1794,
Darwin had argued, following Aristotle, that male plants produce
the seed or embryon, while female plants provide only
nourishment to this seed, and by analogy, had contended "that
the mother does not contribute to the formation of the living
ens in normal generation, but is necessary only for supplying
its nutriment and oxigenation" (Zoonomia, 1794, I: 487).
He then attributed all monstrous births to the female, saying
that deformities result from either excessive or insufficient
nourishment in the egg or uterus (p. 497). But by 1801, Darwin's
observations of both animal and vegetable mules had convinced
him that both male and female seeds contribute to the innate
characteristics of the species (see Zoonomia, 1801, 2:
296-97. Interestingly, while Darwin no longer attributed
monstrous births to uterine deficiencies or excesses, he
continued to hold the male imagination at the moment of
conception responsible for determining both the sex of the child
and its outstanding traits:

I conclude, that the act of generation cannot exist without
being accompanied with ideas, and that a man must have at this
time either a general idea of his own mate form, or of the forms
of his male organs; or an idea of the female form, or of her
organs, and that this marks the sex, and the peculiar
resemblances of the child to either parent. (Zoonomia,
1794, p. 524; 1801, 2: 270)

{{99}} The impact of the female imagination on the seed in utero
is less intense, argued Darwin, because it lasts for a longer
period of time and is therefore more diffuse. It follows that
Darwin, in 1801, attributed the bulk of monstrous births to the
male imagination, a point of obvious relevance to
Frankenstein.

{297} Erasmus Darwin's work on what he called "the economy of
vegetation" has equally significant implications for
Frankenstein. Darwin's comments on plant nutrition,
photosynthesis, and the use of fertilizers and manures in
Phytologia for the first time put gardening and
agriculture on a sound scientific basis.14 Again and again in this lengthy
work, Darwin emphasized the necessity to recycle all organic
matter. His discussion of manures runs to over 25,000 words and
is by far the largest section in this book on plant
agriculture. The best manures, Darwin reports, are:

organic matters, which . . . will by their slow
solution in or near the surface of the earth supply the
nutritive sap-juice to vegetables. Hence all kinds of animal
and vegetable substances, which will undergo a digestive
process, or spontaneous solution, as the flesh, fat, skin and
bones of animals; with their secretions of bile, saliva, mucus;
and their excretions of urine and ordure and also the fruit,
meal, oil, leaves, wood of vegetables, when properly decomposed
on or beneath the soil, supply the most nutritive food to
plants.15

He urges every gardener and farmer to save all organic matter
for manure, "even the parings of his nails and the clippings of
his hair" (p. 241), and further urges the heretical notion that
the soil nourished by the decomposition of human bodies ought to
be available for growing plants. Mourning the waste of rich
soil in churchyards and cemeteries, he argues that

proper burial grounds should be consecrated out of towns, and
divided into two compartments, the earth from one of which,
saturated with animal decomposition, should be taken away once
in ten or twenty years, for the purposes of agriculture; and
sand or clay, or less fertile soil, brought into its place. (p.
243)

Throughout his writings, Darwin described a universe that is
constantly evolving in abundant creativity. Donald Hassler
tellingly defines Darwin's vision of "material forces moving
inexorably over vast distances of time and space, with no
supernatural or anthropological agency, to produce nearly
infinite configurations of organic and inorganic matter" as
Darwin's "comic materialism."16 The phrase neatly combines
Darwin's comic acceptance of limitations with his sense for the
infinitely expansive potential of the universe. I myself would
classify Darwin's celebration of a universe that generates
itself out of "one {298} central chaos" and returns to that
chaos in a catastrophe that "may again by explosions produce a
new world" (Temple of Nature, pp. 166-67) as yet another
example of English romantic irony, of that revolutionary
conception of a universe that is not created by divine fiat but
is rather in constant process, merrily multiplying itself out of
an abundant chaos or what Friedrich Schlegel called the
Fülle.17

Mary Shelley was introduced to Darwin's thought both by her
father and later by her husband, who had been heavily influenced
by Darwin's evolutionary theories while writing "Queen Mab." Percy Shelley
first read The Botanic Garden in July 1811, and in December
18l2 he ordered
Darwin's Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature from
the booksellers Hookham and Hickman.18 The extensive impact of Darwin's
evolutionary and agricultural theories, as well as of {{100}}
his poetic language, on Percy Shelley's Notes to "Queen Mab" and on
such poems as "The Cloud,"
"The Sensitive Plant," and Prometheus Unbound has been
well documented.19 It is clear that Darwin's work
remained vivid in Percy Shelley's mind throughout the period in
which Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, as his prefatory
comment to the novel testifies.

II

Reading Frankenstein against the background of Darwin's
work, we can see that Mary Shelley directly pitted Victor
Frankenstein, that modern Prometheus, against those
gradual evolutionary processes of nature described by Darwin.
Victor Frankenstein wants to originate a new life form quickly,
by chemical means. In his Faustian thirst for knowledge
and power, he dreams:

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first
break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many
happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.
(F, p. 49)

Significantly, in his attempt to create a new species, Victor
Frankenstein substitutes solitary paternal propagation for
sexual reproduction. He thus reverses the evolutionary ladder
described by Darwin. And he engages in a notion of science that
Mary Shelley deplores, the idea that science should manipulate
and control rather than describe and understand nature.

{299} Moreover, his imagination at the moment of conception is
fevered and unhealthy; as he tells Walton,

Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became
nervous to a most painful degree; . . . my voice
became broken, my trembling hands almost refused to accomplish
their task; I became as timid as a love-sick girl, and alternate
tremor and passionate ardour took the place of wholesome
sensation and regulated ambition. (F, p. 51)

Under such mental circumstances, according to Darwin, the
resultant creation could only be a monster. Frankenstein has
further increased the monstrousness of his creation by making a
form that is both larger and more simple than a normal human
being. As he acknowledges to Walton, "As the minuteness of the
parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary
to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature;
that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably
large" (F, p. 49).
{{101}} Darwin had observed that nature moves "from simpler
things to more compound" (Phytologia, p. 118); in defying
nature's law, Victor Frankenstein has created not a more perfect
species but a degenerative one.

In his attempt to override natural evolutionary development and
to create a new species sui generis, Victor Frankenstein enacts
a parody of the orthodox creationist theory. While he denies
the unique power of God to create organic life, he confirms the
capacity of a single creator to originate a new species. Thus
he simultaneously upholds the creationist theory and parodies it
by creating only a monster. In both ways, he blasphemes against
the natural order of things. He moves down rather than up the
evolutionary ladder; he reverses human progress and perverts the
law of the survival of the fittest. And he denies the natural
mode of human reproduction through sexual procreation.

Victor Frankenstein perverts natural evolutionary progress in
yet another way. Despite Darwin's insistence that all dead
organic matter including decomposing human flesh and bones found
in cemeteries ought to be saved for compost heaps and manure,
Victor Frankenstein removes human flesh and bones from
graveyards. And he does so not in order to generate life
organically through what Darwin described as spontaneous animal
vitality in microscopic cells"20 but to create a new life form
through chemical engineering. Frankenstein has thus dis- {300}
rupted the natural life cycle. His attempt to control and speed
up the transformation of decomposing organic material into new
life forms by artificial means violates the rhythms of
nature.

Mary Shelley's novel implicitly invokes Darwin's theory of
gradual evolutionary progress to suggest both the error and the
evil of Victor Frankenstein's bad science. The genuine
improvement of the species can result only from the fusing of
both male and female sexuality. In trying to have a baby
without a woman, Frankenstein denies to his child the maternal
love and nurturance it requires, the very nourishment that
Darwin explicitly equated with the female sex. Frankenstein's
failure to embrace his smiling creature with maternal love, his
horrified rejection of his own creation, spells out the
narrative consequences of solitary paternal propagation. But
even if Frankenstein had been able to provide his child with a
mother's care, he could not have prevented its social ostracism
and misery.

{{102}} It is therefore a triple failure of imagination that
curses Victor Frankenstein. First, by not imaginatively
identifying with his creation, Frankenstein fails to give his
child the parental support he owes to it. He thereby condemns
his creature to become what others behold, a monster. Second,
by imagining that the male can produce a higher form of
evolutionary species by lateral propagation than by sexual
procreation, Frankenstein defines his own imagination as
profoundly anti-evolutionary and thus antiprogressive. Third,
in assuming that he can create a perfect species by chemical
means, Frankenstein defies a central tenet of romantic poetic
ideology: that the creative imagination must work spontaneously,
unconsciously, and above all organically, creating forms that
are themselves organic heterocosms.

Moreover, in trying to create a human being as God created Adam, out of earth and water,
all at once, Victor Frankenstein robs nature of something more
than fertilizer. "On a dreary night in November,
. . . with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony,"
Victor Frankenstein infused "a spark of being into the lifeless
thing that lay" at his feet (F, p. 52). At that moment Victor
Frankenstein became the modern Prometheus, stealing fire
from the gods to give to mankind and thus overthrowing the
established, sacred order of both earth and heaven. At that
moment he transgressed against nature.

To understand the full implications of Frankenstein's
transgression, {301} we must recognize that his stolen "spark of
life" is not merely fire; it is also that recently discovered
caloric fluid called electricity. Victor's
interest in legitimate science is first aroused by the sight of
lightning destroying an old oak tree; it is then that he learns
of the existence of electricity and replicates Benjamin Franklin's
experiment with kite and key and draws down "that fluid from the
clouds" (F, p. 35).
In the late eighteenth century, there was widespread interest in
Franklin's and Father Beccaria's discoveries of atmospheric
electricity, in static electricity, and in artificial or
mechanical electricity generated through such machines as the
Leyden jar. Many scientists explored the possibility, derived
from Newton's concept of the ether as an elastic medium capable
of transmitting the pulsations of light, heat, gravitation, magnetism, and electricity,
that the atmosphere was filled with a thin fluid that was
positively and negatively charged and that could be identified
as a single animating principle appearing under multiple guises
(as light, heat, magnetism, etc.). Erasmus Darwin speculated
that the perpetual necessity of air to the human organism
suggests that "the spirit of animation itself is thus acquired
from the atmosphere, which if it be supposed to be finer or more
subtle than the electric matter, could not long be retained in
our bodies and must therefore require perpetual renovation.21 {{103}} And
Humphry Davy, founder of the field of electrochemistry, first
gave authoritative voice to a theory of matter as electrically
charged atoms. In his Elements of Chemical Philosophy,
Davy argued:

Whether matter consists of indivisible corpuscles, or physical
points endowed with attraction and repulsion, still the same
conclusions may be formed concerning the powers by which they
act, and the quantities in which they combine; and the powers
seem capable of being measured by their electrical relations,
and the quantities on which they act of being expressed by
numbers. (p. 57)

He further concluded that

it is evident that the particles of matter must have space
between them; and . . . it is a probable inference
that [each body's] own particles are possessed of motion; but
. . . the motion, if it exist, must be a vibratory or
undulatory motion, or a motion of the particles round their
axes, or a motion of particles round each other. (p. 95)

{302} Reading Darwin and Davy encouraged Percy Shelley in
scientific speculations that he had embarked upon much earlier,
as a schoolboy at Dr. Greenlaw's Syon House Academy in 1802.
Inspired by the famous lectures of Dr. Adam Walker, Percy
Shelley had early learned to think of electricity and the
processes of chemical attraction and repulsion as modes of a
single polarized force. Walker even identified electricity as
the spark of life itself. At the conclusion of his discussion
of electricity in his A System of Familiar Philosophy,
Walker enthused,

Its power of exciting muscular motion in apparently dead
animals, as well as of increasing the growth, invigorating the
stamina, and reviving diseased vegetation, prove its
relationship or affinity to the living principle.
Though, Proteus-like, it eludes our grasp; plays with our
curiosity; tempts enquiry by fallacious appearances and attacks
our weakness under so many perplexing subtilties; yet it is
impossible not to believe it the soul of the material world, and
the paragon of elements!22

Percy Shelley's basic scientific concepts had long been familiar
to Mary Shelley, ever since the early days of their relationship
when he {{104}} ritually celebrated his birthday by launching
fire balloons.23 That Percy Shelley endorsed Adam
Walker's identification of life with electricity is everywhere
apparent in his poetry. The imagery of Prometheus
Unbound explicitly associates electricity with love, light,
and life itself, as in the final act where the Spirit of the
Earth, earlier imaged as a Cupid figure, becomes a radiant orb
-- or "ten thousand orbs involving and involved" -- of pure
energy. And on the forehead of the spirit sleeping within this
"sphere within sphere" is a "star" (or negative electrode) that
shoots "swords of azure fire" (the blue flames of electrical
discharges) or

Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel
Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought,
Filling the abyss with sun-like lightnings,
And perpendicular now, and now transverse,
Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass,
Make bare the secrets of the Earth's deep heart.24

When Victor Frankenstein steals the spark of being, then, he is
literally stealing Jupiter's lightning bolt, as Benjamin
Franklin had proved. But in Percy Shelley's terms, he is also
stealing the very life of nature, the source of both love and
electricity.

{303} Fully to appreciate the science that lies behind Victor
Frankenstein's endeavors, however, we must remember that in the
1831 Preface to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley specifically
associated electricity with galvanism. In 1831, Victor
Frankenstein is disabused of his belief in the alchemists by a "man of
great research in natural philosophy" who teaches him the
"theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and
galvanism" (F, p.
238); and in her Preface, Mary Shelley directly linked the
attempt to give life to dead matter with galvanism. After
referring to Dr. Darwin's vermicelli experiment, she writes:
"Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse
would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things:
perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured,
brought together, and endued with vital warmth" (F, p. 227).

In 1791 the
Bolognese physiologist Luigi
Galvani published his De Viribus Electricitatis in Motui
Musculari (or Commentary on the Effects of Electricity on
Muscular Motion),25 in which he came to the conclusion
that animal tissue contained a heretofore neglected innate vital
force, which he called "animal electricity" but which was
subsequently widely known as "galvanism"; this force activated
both nerves and muscles when spanned by an arc of metal wires
{{105}} connected to a pile of copper and zinc plates. Galvani
believed that his new vital force was a form of electricity
different from both the "natural" form of electricity produced
by lightning or by the torpedo and electric eel and the
"artificial" form produced by friction (i.e., static
electricity). Galvani argued that the brain is the most
important source of the production of this "electric fluid" and
that the nerves acted as conductors of this fluid to other
nerves and muscles, the tissues of which act much like the outer
and inner surfaces of the widely used Leyden jar. Thus the flow
of animal electric fluid provided a stimulus which produced
contractions of convulsions in the irritable muscle fibers.

Galvani's theories made the British headlines in December 1802 when, in the
presence of their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the
dukes of York, Clarence, and Cumberland, Galvani's nephew,
disciple, and ardent defender, Professor Luigi Aldini of Bologna
University, applied a voltaic pile connected by metallic wires
to the ear and nostrils of a recently killed ox head. At that
moment, "the eyes were seen to open, the ears to shake, the
tongue to be agitated, and the {304} nostrils to swell, in the
same manner as those of the living animal, when irritated and
desirous of combating another of the same species."26 But
Professor Aldini's most notorious demonstration of galvanic
electricity took place on 17 January 1803 -- On that day he
applied galvanic electricity to the corpse of the murderer
Thomas Forster. The body of the recently hanged criminal was
collected from Newgate, where it had lain in the prison yard at
a temperature Of 30 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour, by the
president of the College of Surgeons, Mr. Keate, and brought
immediately to Mr. Wilson's anatomical theater where the
following experiments were performed. When wires attached to a
pile composed of 120 plates of zinc and 120 plates of copper
were connected to the ear and mouth of the dead criminal, Aldini
later reported, "the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles
were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened" (p.
193) -- When the wires were applied to the dissected thumb
muscles, they "induced a forcible effort to clench the hand";
when applied to the ear and rectum, they "excited in the muscles
contractions much stronger . . . The action even of
those muscles furthest distant from the points of contact with
the arc was so much increased as almost to give an appearance of
re-animation." And when volatile alkali was smeared on the
nostrils and mouth before the galvanic stimulus was applied,
"the convulsions appeared to be much increased . . .
and extended from the muscles of the head, face, and neck, as
far as the deltoid. The effect in this case surpassed our most
sanguine expectations," Aldini exults, and remarkably concludes
that "vitality might, perhaps, have been {{106}} restored, if
many circumstances had not rendered it impossible" (pp.
194-95). Here is the scientific prototype of Victor
Frankenstein, restoring life to dead bodies.¶

An event so notorious and so widely reported in the popular
press must have been discussed in both the Shelley and Godwin
households at the time and would have been recalled, however
inaccurately, during the conversations between Shelley and Byron
in which the possibility of reanimating a corpse was discussed.
Indeed, the popular interest in galvanic electricity reached
such a pitch in Germany that an edict forbidding the use of
decapitated criminals' heads for galvanic experiments was passed
in Prussia in 1804. It is probably to these events, as well as
to experiments in Germany by F. H. A. Humboldt, C. J. C.
Grapengiesser, and Johann Caspar Creve and reports of them pub-
{305} lished by J. A. Heidmann and Lorenz Oken, that Percy
Shelley referred in his Preface to Frankenstein when he
insisted that "the event on which this fiction is founded has
been supposed, by Dr. Darwin and some of the physiological
writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence" (F,
p. 6). Even though Erasmus
Darwin never fully endorsed the revolutionary theory of Galvani
and Volta that electricity is
the cause of muscular motion, he was convinced that electricity
stimulated plant growth (Botanic Garden, 1:463).

{{107}} Mary Shelley's familiarity with these galvanic
experiments came not only from Shelley and Byron, but also from
Byron's physician, Dr.
William Polidori. As a medical student at the University of
Edinburgh, Polidori had been exposed to the latest galvanic
theories and experiments by the famous Edinburgh physician Dr.
Charles Henry Wilkinson, whose review of the literature,
Elements of Galvanism in Theory and Practice, was
published in 1804. Dr. Wilkinson continued research on
galvanism and developed his own galvanic treatments for
intermittent fevers, amaurosis, and quinsy, and he reported
several successes.

II

Mary Shelley based Victor Frankenstein's attempt to create a new
species from dead organic matter through the use of chemistry
and electricity on the most advanced scientific research of the
early nineteenth century. But Frankenstein reflects much
more than merely an intelligent use of the latest scientific
knowledge. Perhaps because she was a woman, Mary Shelley
understood that much of the scientific research of her day
incorporated an attempt to dominate the female.

Francis Bacon heralded the
seventeenth-century scientific revolution as a calculated
attempt to control and exploit female Nature: "I am come in very
truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to
your service and make her your slave." Bacon's metaphor of a
passive, possessable female nature radically transformed the
traditional image of female nature as Dame Kind, the "all
creating" and bounteous mother earth who single-handedly bore
and nourished her children. But it was Bacon's metaphor that
structured much of the new scientific writing in England in the
eighteenth century. Isaac Barrow, Newton's teacher, declared
that the aim of the new philosophy was to "search {306} Nature
out of her Concealments, and unfold her dark Mysteries,"27 while Robert Boyle noted
contemptuously that "some men care only to know Nature, others
desire to command her."28 Henry Oldenburg, a future
secretary of the Royal
Society, invoked Bacon to support his assertion that the
"true sons of learning" are those men who do not remain
satisfied with the well-known truths but rather "penetrate from
Nature's antechamber to her inner closet."29 As Brian
Easlea concludes, many seventeenth-century natural philosophers
and their successors viewed the scientific quest as a virile
masculine penetration into a passive and by herself uncreative
female nature, a penetration that would, in Bacon's words, not
merely exert a "gentle guidance over nature's course" but rather
"conquer and subdue her" and even "shake her to her
foundations."30

A product of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century, Frankenstein had been taught to see nature the way
Bacon did, as female but inert. He sees nature "objectively,"
as something separate from himself, a passive and even dead
"object of my affection"31 that can and should be penetrated,
analyzed, and controlled. He thus accords nature no living soul
or "personhood" that requires recognition or respect.

Wordsworth had
articulated the danger inherent in thinking of nature as
something distinct from human consciousness. A reader of
Wordsworth, Mary Shelley understood nature in his terms, as a
sacred all-creating mother, a living organism or ecological
community with which human beings interact in mutual dependence;
to defy this filial bond, as Frankenstein does, is to break
one's ties with the source of life and health. Hence
Frankenstein becomes ill in the process of carrying out his
experiment: "every night I was
oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most
painful degree"; and at its completion, he collapses in "a nervous fever" that confines
him to his sickbed for several months.

But Mary Shelley's critique of objective, rationalistic thought
goes beyond Wordsworth's romantic organicist notion that "we
murder to dissect." As Gillian Beer has suggested elsewhere in
this volume, scientific discourse often depends upon metaphors
that reflect the dominant concerns of the culture. Mary Shelley
perceived a potentially dangerous metaphor inherent in the
scientific thought of her day. {307} Nature is female, Dame
Kind, Mother Earth (see Sally Shuttleworth's essay in this
volume). As "all creating nature," she can be seen as the
abundantly providing, ever nurturing mother, the blessed source
of life itself. But this sacramental view of female nature has
been foresworn by Waldman, Frankenstein, and many of the leading
scientists of Mary Shelley's day. As Professor Waldman
proclaims, scientists "penetrate into the recesses of nature,
and shew how she works in her hiding places"
(F, p. 42, my
emphasis). Nature has become the passive female whose sole
function is to satisfy male desires. Carolyn Merchant, Evelyn
Fox Keller, and Brian Easlea have drawn our attention to the
negative consequences of this identification of nature as the
passive female. Construing nature as the "other" has led, as
Merchant shows, to the increasing destruction of the environment
and the disruption of the delicate ecological balance between
man and nature. Moreover, as Keller has suggested in her
studies of how the making of men and women has affected the
making of science, the professional scientific demand for
"objectivity" and detachment often masks a prior psychological
alienation from the mother and an aggressive desire to dominate
the female sex object. The result can be a dangerous division
between what C. P. Snow called the "two cultures," between the
power-seeking practices of science and the concerns of humanists
with moral responsibility, emotional communion, and spiritual
values. The scientist who analyzes, manipulates, and attempts
to control nature unconsciously engages in a form of oppressive
sexual politics. Construing nature as the female other, he
attempts to make nature serve his own ends, to gratify his own
desires for power, wealth, reputation.

Frankenstein's scientific project is clearly an attempt to gain
power. He is inspired by Waldman's description of scientists who
"have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command
the thunders of the heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock
the invisible world with its own shadows" (F, p. 42). He has sought the power
of a father over his children, of God over his creation. "A new
species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and
excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could
claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should
deserve theirs," he exults (F, p. 49). More subtly yet more
pervasively, Frankenstein has sought power over the female. He
has "pursued nature to her hiding {308} places" (F, p. 49) in an attempt not only to
penetrate nature and show how her hidden womb works but actually
to steal or appropriate that womb. In effect, Frankenstein has
tried to usurp the function of the female in the reproductive
cycle and thus eliminate the necessity, at least for the purposes
of the biological survival of mankind, of female sexuality.

A fear of female sexuality is implicit in a patriarchal
construction of gender.32 Uninhibited female sexual
experience threatens the foundation of patriarchal power: the
establishment of patrilineal kinship networks together with the
conveyancing of both property and prestige by inheritance
entailed upon a male line. Significantly, in the patriarchal
world of Geneva pictured in
the novel, female sexuality is strikingly repressed. All the
women are presented as sexless: Caroline Beaufort is a devoted
daughter and chaste wife; Elizabeth Lavenza's relationship with
Victor is that of a sister; even Sate merely holds hands with
her beloved Felix.

In this context, the murder of Elizabeth Lavenza on her wedding
night becomes doubly significant. As several critics have
noted, the scene of her death is based on a painting Mary
Shelley knew well, Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare. The
corpse of Elizabeth lies in the attitude in which Fuseli placed
his nightmare ridden woman: "She was there, lifeless and
inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her
pale and distorted features half covered by her hair" (F,
p. 193). Fuseli's woman is an
image of female erotic desire, both lusting for and terrified of
the succubus that crouches upon her breasts. Invoking this
image, Mary Shelley alerts us to what Victor fears: his bride's
sexuality.33
For Elizabeth might never have been killed had Victor not sent
her into their nuptial bedroom alone. Returning to the body of
the murdered Elizabeth, Victor "embraced her with ardour; but
the deathly languor and coldness of the limbs told me, that what
I now held in my arms had ceased to be the Elizabeth whom I had
loved and cherished" (F, p. 193). Victor most
passionately desires his bride when he knows she is dead. The
allusion to his earlier dream, when he thought to embrace the
living Elizabeth but instead held in his arms the corpse of his
mother, reveals Victor's most powerful erotic desire, a desire
to possess the dead mother.

Afraid of female sexuality and the power of human reproduction
it {309} enables, both Frankenstein and the patriarchal society
he represents use the technologies of science and the laws of
the polis to control and repress women. But Mary Shelley
portrays Frankenstein's desire to penetrate and usurp the female
as monstrous, unattainable, and finally self-destructive. For
nature is not the passive, inert, or "dead" matter that
Frankenstein imagines;34 she resists and revenges his
attempts. During his research, nature denies to Victor
Frankenstein both mental and physical health: "my enthusiasm was
checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by
slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade,
than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every
night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a
most painful degree" (F, p. 51). Victor continues to be
tormented by anxiety attacks, bouts of delirium, periods of
distraction and madness. As soon as he determines to blaspheme
against nature a second time, by creating a female human being,
nature torments him with a return of his mental illness: "Every
thought that was devoted to it was an extreme anguish, and every
word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my lips to quiver and
my heart to palpitate" (F, p. 156); "my spirits became
unequal -- I grew restless and nervous" (F, p. 162). In the end,
Frankenstein's obsession with destroying his creature exposes
him to such mental and physical distress that he dies before his
twenty-fifth birthday.

Moreover, nature pursues Victor Frankenstein with the very
electricity he has stolen: lightning, thunder, and rain rage
around him. On the November night on which he steals the "spark
of being" from nature, "the rain . . . poured from a
black and comfortless sky" (F, p. 54). He glimpses his
creature during a flash of lightning at Plainpalais (F, p. 71) and first speaks with him
as "rain poured down in torrents, and thick mists hid the
summits of the mountains" (F, p. 91). Setting sail from the Orkney island after he has
destroyed his female creature, Frankenstein is pursued by a
fierce wind and high waves that threaten his own life (F,
p. 169). Frankenstein ends
his life and his pursuit of his monster surrounded by the aurora
borealis, the electromagnetic field of the north pole. The
atmospheric effects of the novel, which most readers have
dismissed as little more than the traditional trappings of
Gothic fiction, in fact manifest the power of nature to revenge
herself upon those who transgress her sacred boundaries. The
elemental forces that {310} Victor has released pursue him to
his hiding places, hounding him like avenging Furies, denying
him the capacity for natural procreation.

The novel thus calls into question the gendered metaphor on
which much Western scientific theory and practice is founded.
The attempt of science to penetrate, possess, and control Mother
Nature entails both a violation of the sacred rights of nature
and a false belief in the "objectivity" or "rationality" of
scientific research. When it construes nature as a passive and
possessable female, Western science encodes a sexist metaphor
that has profoundly troubling implications, not only for women
but for human survival. As Frankenstein's monster tells him,
"Remember that I have power; . . . I can make you so
wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you"
(F, p. 165). Like
Victor Frankenstein, modern scientists have too often treated
nature as the "other," to be exploited rather than understood
and served through detailed, loving, and noninterventionist
description. In their search for the truth about the workings
of the physical universe, they have ignored the possibility that
their manipulations of nature might harm her. Too often, they
have failed to take responsibility for the predictable
consequences of their research, failed to care for their own
technological progeny. As Mary Shelley first perceived, a
scientific method founded on the gendered construction of nature
as the female other, as the passive object of desire, hence
possessable and exploitable, can produce monsters, even monsters
of biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare capable of
destroying civilization as we know it.

3. Sir Harold Hartley discusses the importance
to Davy's career of this introductory lecture in Humphry
Davy (London: Nelson, 1966).

4.Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick
L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), p. 67.
Laura Crouch argued that the
Discourse is the book listed by Mary Shelley in her
Journal under Books Read in 1816 as "Introduction to
Davy's Chemistry." See "Davy's A Discourse, Introductory to a
Course of Lectures on Chemistry: A Possible Scientific
Source of Frankenstein," Keats-Shelley Journal 27
(1978): 35-37. Mary Shelley would have known of Humphry Davy's
{311} work since childhood; she may even have been introduced to
him when Davy dined with Godwin on 16 February 1801.

11. Percy Shelley also read Buffon
attentively. In his journal letter to Peacock of 23 July 1816,
Shelley alludes to the first volume of Buffon's work La
théorie de la terre, in the course of describing the
glaciers of Mont Blanc: "I will not pursue Buffon's sublime but
gloomy theory, that this earth which we inhabit will at some
future period be changed into a mass of frost" (Letters,
1:499).

19. For the influence of Erasmus Darwin on
Percy Shelley's thought and poetry see Carl Grabo, A Newton
among Poets: Shelley's Use of Science in "Prometheus
Unbound" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1930), pp. 22-74; Desmond King-Hele's Shelley: His Thought
and Work (London: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 162-64, as well as
his Erasmus Darwin, pp. 144-51; Kenneth Neill Cameron,
The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (London; Victor
Gollancz, 195 1), pp. 121, 24o; Robert M. Maniquis, "The
Puzzling Mimosa: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in Romanticism,"
Studies in Romanticism 8 (1969): 129-55.

26. John Aldini, An Account of the Late
Improvements in Galvanism, with a series of Curious and
Interesting Experiments performed before the Commissioners of
the French National Institute and repeated lately ill the
Anatomical Theatres of London; to which is added, An Appendix,
containing the author's Experiments on the Body of a Malefactor
executed at New Gate (London: Cuthell and Martin, 1803), p.
54. (This book is an English translation of the original French
text, Essai théorique et expérimentale sur le
galvanisme published in Paris in 1802 and translated into
German by F. H. Martens and published at Leipzig in 1804.)

31. This phrase was deleted by Percy Shelley
from Mary Shelley's manuscript of Frankenstein (now in
the Bodleian Library, Abinger Dep. c. 477/1). Her original
version of the passage at F, 50, lines 31-33 reads thus:
"I wished, as it were, to procrastinate my feelings of
affection, until the great object of my affection was
compleated."

32. One of the first and still most insightful
analyses of the psychological and cultural dimensions of male
hostility to female sexuality appears in Karen Horney's essays,
collected in Feminine Psychology, ed. Harold Kelman
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), especially "The Flight
from Womanhood" (1926), pp. 54-70; "The Distrust between the
Sexes" (1930), pp. 108-18; and "The Dread of Woman" (1932), pp.
133-46.

34. While I am in large agreement with Mary
Poovey's analysis of Frankenstein's egoistic desire (in The
Proper Lady and the Woman Writer [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984], pp. 123-33), I do not share her view that
the nature we see in Frankenstein is "fatal to human beings and
human relationships" (p. 126). Poovey fails to distinguish
between Frankenstein's perception of nature as "dead" matter and
Mary Shelley's own vision of nature as a sacred ecological
system in which human beings ought to participate in conscious
harmony.

¶.{{106}} In further experiments
conducted by Aldini in 1804, the bodies of
human corpses became violently agitated and one raised itself as
if about to walk; arms alternately rose and fell; and one
forearm was made to hold a weight of several pounds, while the
fists clenched and beat violently the table upon which the body
lay. Natural respiration was also artificially reestablished
and, through pressure exerted against the ribs, a lighted candle
paced before the mouth was several times extinguished.24a

Aldini's experiments on the severed heads of oxen, frogs legs.
dogs' bodies, and human corpses were replicated widely throughout
Europe in the early 1800s. His colleagues at Bologna, Drs.
Vassali-Eandi, Rossi, and Giulio, reported to the Academy of
Turin on August 15, 1802, that they had been able to excite
contractions even in the involuntary organs of the heart and
digestive systems, 25a while applications of galvanic
electricity to vegetables, animals, and humans were conducted in
Germany by F.H.A. Humboldt, Edmund Schmück, C.J.C.
Grappengiesser, and Johann Caspar Creve.26a Their experiments were reported in
1806 by J.A. Heidmann in his Theorie der Galvanischen
Elektrizität, while the theoretical implications of
galvanism were expounded by Lorenz Oken in his influential
Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (Leipzig, 1809-10). Oken
argued that polarity is the first and only force in the world;
that galvanism or electrical polarity is therefore the principle
of life; and that organic life is galvanism in a state of
homogenous mass.27a

24a. These results are reported by Paul Fleury
Mottelay, in his Bibliographical History of Electricity and
Magnetism (London: C. Griffins & Col, Lts., 1922),
which gives a complete set of references to Aldini's
experiments, pp. 305-7.